Think being a content marketer is tough? Try convincing an entire nation! Anyone fighting to gain or retain the White House needs to know a thing or two about getting a message across in the most persuasive way possible. And with a relentless news cycle in print, television and radio, plus the newer channels of social, email, apps and more, the choice of media can have a massive impact on that message.

We’re months deep into the USA’s presidential primaries hitting us from all sides with ads and counter ads, debates and press conferences, protests and arguments. And really, really bad hair. Donald Trump’s message may be confused and often incoherent, but he knows how to use each medium to great effect.

Content marketers frequently confuse media with message. So which is more important? What can marketers learn from White House campaigns?

Does Message Trump Medium?

I’m a West Wing tragic and a devoted follower of the “teachings” of White House speech-writer Toby Ziegler. The episode Life on Mars contains a scene that may seem eerily familiar to many content marketers.

Sure, his ranting gets the better of his syntax at the end there, but the point is clear.

Too often, marketers plan content driven by a perceived need to do “something” without necessarily having a clear idea to back it up.

“We need a white paper.” “It’s time for another YouTube video.” “Let’s launch a blog because all of our competitors have.” None of these are good enough reasons to do anything if there isn’t a worthy content idea behind it.

This focus on medium over message can waste time, money and resources producing content poorly suited to the channel or weakened by a process that’s upside down.

That’s why there is so much mediocre, uninspiring and repetitive content out there that hardly anyone reads/views. On our frantic marketing treadmills, the motivation to publish something – anything – to tick a particular box can be stronger than the willingness to spend enough time planning and producing something truly exceptional.

This extremely common approach forgets that the medium – e-book, video, blog post, infographic, etc. – is just the container for the content – the idea, information or message. After all, isn’t that what “content” literally means? We want the beans, not the tin they came in.

You’ve got to start with an idea – and a good one!

• What valuable research or information does the company have that would merit a white paper?
• What information is best conveyed as a video?
• Is there a fresh theme for the blog that can inspire enough exceptional content ideas without repeating what’s already commonplace?

Yet, while the quality of your content is important, that doesn’t mean any old container will do. Those beans might not be quite as fresh and delicious if they come to us in a paper bag …

… Or Does the Medium Trump the Message?

Marshall McLuhan coined the term “The medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) to describe how the choice of medium can have significant consequences for how a message is received, interpreted and understood. This is best illustrated by another White House example, this time from the real world.

In 1960, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in what was the very first televised presidential debate. Despite television’s ascendancy – 88% of American households had a TV set – many in the audience still tuned in their radios to hear the two candidates present their arguments.

Polled after the debate, the radio and television audiences gave conflicting versions of the outcome. The smaller radio audience overwhelmingly gave the debate to Nixon, while TV watchers plumped for Kennedy as the outright winner. The larger TV audience, therefore, translated into a huge boost to Kennedy’s campaign.

In 2010, Time magazine marked the fiftieth anniversary of the debate with an article that couldn’t overstate the impact this shift in medium had on the presidency:

It’s now common knowledge that without the nation’s first televised debate … Kennedy would never have been president.

Time magazine, How the Nixon-Kennedy Debate Changed the World

Both broadcasts had included the same arguments, the same ideas, the same content. The only difference was the medium.

On radio, Nixon’s rhetoric was what people expected—firm, resolute, experienced. On television, Nixon looked pale and unwell, following a recent hospitalisation. Under the studio lights, he appeared to be sweating and uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Kennedy looked sharp, handsome, presidential and tanned.

These factors might seem irrelevant when we should be assessing the power of their words. But we never assess words in a vacuum. We take in a wide variety of other signals when interpreting meaning, including body language, tone, facial expressions and other signs. Nixon’s discomfort meant that those who could see these additional signals placed less trust in what he had to say.

On radio, Nixon sounded presidential. On television, he looked like a phoney.

Every medium includes a different mix of additional signals. The layout of a print magazine – such as the font – can influence our interpretation of the message. You wouldn’t undermine a serious message by formatting it in Comic Sans, for example.

How a YouTube video is put together can contain numerous clues that also add to the message: High production values, music and graphics might suggest a confident, big-budget commitment while a simple video shot on an iPhone may indicate a much lower budget but far greater authenticity.

A white paper indicates seriousness and academic rigor (or stultifying boredom depending on your perspective), while an attractive e-book might present the same ideas and information in a less intimidating, more casual manner.

Each of these choices sends signals to the reader/viewer about not only how the brand wants to be seen, but also how they see the audience. Above all, it adds many additional layers of meaning to the content itself – most of which may only exist in the minds of the audience.

Your choice of medium and the format you apply to it should be the best compliment to your ideas and content. They’re equally important. Paying more attention to one over the other will almost always undermine both.

It’s a common challenge for many content marketers: You need writers capable of delivering highly readable content for your blogs, e-books, and more. However, your writers also need expertise in your topic area if their content is to have the necessary insight, heft and authority your audience expects.

Finding a good writer who is also an expert on a niche or highly technical industry topic – and who is also available to write for you at an affordable rate – can be like hunting the proverbial unicorn. Yet the very exclusivity of those skills is what makes the hunt worthwhile.

There probably isn’t an industry or topic area that isn’t already buried under an avalanche of content. For your content to stand out it must be exceptional and it must be rare – and rare, exceptional content demands an exceptionally rare kind of writer.

A unicorn-shaped hole

Before I went freelance, I worked in the marketing department of a new cloud hosting business, where I was responsible for all content and social media. I had years of experience in another web hosting company writing reams of content for the average non-technical website owner. However, while many principles were the same, I quickly learned that the cloud hosting audience was very different. Our customers were software developers, sysadmins and CIOs—highly technical, distrustful of marketing and certainly more knowledgeable about cloud computing than I would ever be.

I’m certainly more technical than most people I know, but this was a whole new level. I know just enough web code to break my website in increasingly imaginative ways and with stunning regularity. So while I understand the general concepts and some of the technical details involved in cloud computing, I’m definitely no expert.

This posed a problem. I was comfortable writing web copy, email promotions, case studies and other marketing paraphernalia but more technically detailed long-form content was definitely beyond me. No matter how good my writing, why would anyone read a technical white paper written by the least technical person in the building? I couldn’t offer any genuine thought leadership on the topics that mattered to them. Why would anyone care what the guy in marketing wanted to say?

While everyone on the team was supportive of the content strategy, none of them were aspiring writers. I needed professional writers capable of matching the technical expertise of our audience and I knew they wouldn’t be easy to find.

I had a unicorn-shaped hole in my content marketing strategy.

Where unicorns roam …

The unicorn problem can become even more obvious when a business decides to outsource some or all of its content writing. The more technical or niche the topic, the fewer writers will have the necessary authority and knowledge to drive genuinely informative and essential content.

You might start by approaching a few content agencies. While any agency will tell you that they can supply exactly what you need, you’ll need to dig deeper to test their claims. Some agencies rely on internal teams of generalist writers working across all their clients so that I would be allocated a writer with even less expertise in the field than myself. However, others build large databases of experienced writers and subject matter experts from a range of fields, only offering them appropriate projects if and when there is a suitable match.

Ask how the agency will source and assign the right writer(s) for the job, insist on a shortlist of writers for your approval and ask for samples of their work.

This last point is extremely important. Is their experience represented by a list of generic blog posts with no exclusive insight and only basic, entry-level advice? Or, do they have any byline credits in reputable magazines or industry journals?

Remember, while you may be able to assess the quality of their writing, you may not be the right person to assess the quality of their ideas and information. Run a few articles past your team to see if they raise any red flags. Check social media to see how others react to their writing. If your target audience routinely shares or comments on their articles (or doesn’t), it can give you an idea of their influence and authority.

Alternatively, research any relevant industry news sites and publications. With many years researching and writing for industry columns or trade journals, journalists already know how to write for such a demanding audience.

Unfortunately, some journalists are extremely resistant to any suggestion of writing brand content. Their distaste is usually due to a misguided opinion that branded content and journalistic ethics are somehow mutually exclusive. However, there are many other journalists that not only see content marketing as a valid form of journalism but also may be keen for the opportunity as newsrooms and traditional media continue to cut back.

Whether you find the unicorn in an agency or a newsroom, be prepared to pay extra. Unicorns charge more – a lot more – and quite rightly too. After all, you’re paying for their years of experience, specialised insight and IP, not just their skill with words.

The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!

No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

James Whistler (to an impertinent judge): The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890)

Building the unicorn

If you can’t find (or afford) a unicorn, don’t panic – most of you won’t. It might be like taping a cone of paper to a horse’s nose but you can still create a unicorn with the right approach.

The best subject matter experts could well be within your own business. No one knows what your business does and how it matters to your customers better than the team behind your products and services. That’s why they’re there. Yes, they’re not necessarily great writers – they may not even be okay writers – but they will be once you’ve finished with them.

In my experience, some of the most valuable branded content are derived from information and expertise that could only have come from within that business. While I can craft the story and add the words, the core of the content – the information, the data, the insights, the predictions, the advice – is provided by other team members with knowledge and expertise I could never replicate with a Google search. And this means the final piece of content will not only be informative and well-written but also unique to that business. It is their unique insight, their experience, their internal research, their specific data.

Back at the cloud hosting company, this is how I eventually filled my unicorn-sized hole from within. Once a month, our staff meeting included a call for ideas suitable for articles and blog posts. While many were nervous in the beginning, sceptical of their blogging skills, I soon reassured them that all I wanted was their expertise for me to build upon. If they could send me as much or as little as they could manage, in whatever form they felt comfortable, I would take their ideas and information the rest of the way.

All I needed was one contribution from each person every few weeks and the blog would have a variety of expert viewpoints and advice. And that’s exactly what happened. One might send me a few bullet points to summarise an idea or step-by-step advice for me to flesh out while another would send me quite serviceable first drafts. I quickly learned what each person was capable of and how much time they had to give me – adapting my approach to suit each. Some contributions required more work from me than others, but the result was a consistently strong blog that represented the genuine expertise – and, yes, even thought leadership – of the company.

As the team saw their bylines attached to the published blog posts, their enthusiasm grew. After all, I was making them look good and helping to develop their own online reputation and authority. It may seem a bit more pantomime horse than unicorn but everyone was a winner – including the audience, who got the content they deserved!

Marketers constantly crunch data to try to determine what works (or doesn’t) and how we can improve or optimise our efforts. Unfortunately, most marketers aren’t data analysts or statisticians. If you want to use maths to answer meaningful questions, you have to know which are the right numbers, how to find them, how to interpret them and which insights to draw.

“They’re pretty high mountains,” said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.

 

“Slope go up, slope go down” said M’Bu gnomically.

 

“That’s true,” said Azhural. “Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.”

 

Terry Pratchett: Moving Pictures, p141

This remains one of my favourite Terry Pratchett gags because I come across variants of this quite regularly in the marketing world. It reflects how statistical information is constantly oversimplified, misinterpreted (or sometimes manipulated) to support an ideal view or draw meaningless conclusions.

This is why I get so frustrated with simplistic claims, such as: “Headlines with odd numbers generate 20% more clicks than headlines with even numbers”.

2020 Update: The post is no longer on the Hubspot website but can still be found via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: The Anatomy of a Highly Shareable List Post.

That’s not an insight. Saying that most leaves are green doesn’t help anyone understand how chlorophyl works. The article and infographic tell me nothing about why odd-numbered lists may (or, indeed, may not) drive more traffic, which would be far more useful to know. It sticks purely to the numbers as if that’s all the information we need. Follow the formula and the numbers will save you.

Except, they won’t. Statistics need context and interpretation.

Some very odd numbers

I’m pretty certain modern society hasn’t developed an irrational and unexplained bias towards half of all numbers just because they’re odd. There has to be more to it.

When I posted my disbelief on Twitter it prompted an interesting discussion that concluded it isn’t about odds or evens at all. We decided a more likely explanation would be that some numbers seem accurate and authentic while others seem rounded up. 100 Tips to … seems artificial and neat, while 87 Tips to … suggests a more exhaustive, detailed and selective list that has clearly determined there isn’t an 88th tip worth mentioning.

This isn’t a new insight. It’s why Mount Everest was long considered to be 29,002 feet high. In 1856, Andrew Waugh – then British Surveyor General of India – first calculated the height of Everest as exactly 29,000 feet. Convinced that no one would believe his calculations were accurate, Waugh added two feet to the final figure in his report to avoid the impression of having rounded up and thereby protect his reputation. Hence, Waugh became the rather unfair answer to the question; “Who was the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest?”.

Yet Waugh still used an even number to suggest accuracy. While adding three feet may have been too much inaccuracy for Waugh to bear, history fails to record why he didn’t choose to write 29,001 feet instead.

Does a headline promising 88 tips really seem any less exhaustive and specific than one offering 87? I don’t think so – and I doubt any data can definitively show so. And, of course, any odd number that ends in a five can similarly give the appearance of inaccurate rounding, such as 25.

This is why the claim about odd numbers just has to be bogus. This is probably due to someone asking the wrong questions of the available data, and failing to correctly interpret or even validate the results. The original research, and every article that has since repeated the statistic, failed to look beyond the numbers to investigate what may really be going on. Instead, the article and infographic takes the statistic at face value and just moves on to the next simplified, untested claim.

In the case of this infographic, that would be “High quality images get 121% more shares”. But unless you let us in on how “high quality” is defined – and that’s a whole topic of its own – such a statistic is meaningless. You can’t have detailed statistical accuracy at one end of a claim and vaguely defined terms at the other (“engagement”, I’m also looking at you!)

Then there’s “Floating share buttons increase social traffic by 27%”. Okay, but even Twitter has admitted – and Chartbeat has proven – that there is absolutely no correlation between social shares/social traffic and whether people actually read your content, which must surely be your goal as a content marketer.

Cherry-picking one stat as circumstantial evidence to imply success, while ignoring more relevant and representative data, is real head-in-the-sand stuff.

I could go on, but I won’t. There’s another important issue that becomes obvious once we dig a little deeper into some of these pearls of statistical wisdom.

Is your source a goose, or can I have a gander?

Where do these stats originate? Let’s take my first example about odd-numbered list headlines and trace it back.

While Hubspot highlighted this stat in its social media updates and blog post, the writer’s source was an infographic from Siege Media – an SEO and content marketing agency. The infographic lists some sources at the bottom and it seems this particular stat is taken from an article posted by my mates at the Content Marketing Institute way back in 2011.

Already we can say that this information is five years old, at least. That doesn’t mean the stat is wrong – some trends and behaviours hold true no matter how old. But content styles have changed a lot in the last five years, driven by Google updates, changing social media behaviours and more.

Either way, I’d want to see some more recent data before I repeated the same stat when writing articles and blog posts for clients.

Even the 2011 article isn’t the original source. Written by the Senior Marketing Manager at Outbrain, the post discusses Outbrain’s recent research. “To learn more about what makes readers actually click through, Outbrain […] looked through data on 150,000 article headlines or titles that were recommended across our platform.”

Okay, so we know a little more about the sample size, but still not enough to help us interpret and assess the meagre and sweeping conclusions we’re given. Where are the numbers? What was the methodology? Above all, where is the link to this study?

I spent an hour searching Google for the original source. While I found a number of posts by Outbrain employees on various major websites that referenced the same statistics, and even more blog posts that then referenced those, I was unable to find any original research or any more detailed background to these claims.

This raises a couple of other issues. If Outbrain used unreleased internal research as a PR exercise to get some vague headline-worthy findings into articles on big sites such as Mashable, why does hardly anyone question their conclusions or ask for more evidence? I found only one commenter who asked for a link to the source material (no answer was given).

Alternatively, maybe the Outbrain research was once available but has since been taken down. After all, it was five years ago; web pages come and go. Over the years, the various guest posts may have identified and removed the broken link. If so, I’ve no problem with that. However, if anything, the removal of the link (if there ever was one) is just another indicator to a pedant like me that the information is outdated or no longer relevant.

Either way, both the date and the lack of an original source mean an infographic from December 2015 shouldn’t be repeating questionable stats from 2011. Without an original source, stripped of context and devoid of meaningful insight, it is no more than anecdotal hokum.

Yet marketing blogs and white papers are full of such unworthy claims, given a veneer of authenticity because of our industry’s obsession with data.

Let’s play Numberwang!

Honestly, I’m not picking on Hubspot, Siege Media and Outbrain. The above is just one example of a problem that plagues the entire industry.

Marketing’s obsession with finding a silver bullet formula for success means we are bombarded with advice that is often contradictory, drawing on insufficient data or distorted by generic assumptions.

• Should blog post headlines contain eight or fourteen words?
• Should blog posts be 250 or 2500 words?
• Is it better to send your email newsletter on a Monday or a Tuesday?

Yes, most of the above examples advise caution: There is no definitive answer, there are many other variables in play, don’t take these stats as gospel. In short: “We’re not entirely sure about these findings either.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the same stats from being circulated without those caveats and warnings; reduced to basic graphs in infographics, summarised into bite-sized advice in listicles, and truncated into ever fewer characters for social media.

We’re surrounded by outdated findings, poorly sourced statistics and recycled facts that are continually amplified around the echo chamber until they become conventional wisdom.

Ironically, by the time this happens, such wisdom may have very little to do with reality.